Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-packaging (130 mails)

[Guido Berhoerster <guido+opensuse.org@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Michael Matz <matz@xxxxxxx> [2010-03-25 14:47]:
> > > I still believe that we should treat bash scripts labeled as /bin/sh 
> > > as bugs, but Michael is right that it doesn't justify a fatal error. 
> > > Then again, we urgently need some kind of rpmlint statistic for our 
> > > packages available.
> >
> > It is a bug
>
> Yes.
>
> > and it should be treated as such,
>
> Not necessarily.  It's always the question of how common that bug is, if 
> it's so common that it became sort of it's own de-facto standard, the 
> issues aren't black-white anymore.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for 
> strictly adhering to standards, everybody who ever came to me with "your 
> compiler miscompiles my code" knows that ;-)  But sometimes we do 
> implement extensions if a certain type of error became too common.
>
> You're right that the work needed to fix such bugs needs to be taken into 
> account, which in this particular case is very low (1s/sh/bash/), per 
> incidence.  It's the sum of all those small changes I'm worried about, 
> hence we should gradually go there, and in the mean-time not throw errors 
> but warnings.

I agree and I can understand the concerns of maintainers about
additional workload, my only concern is/was that we might chase
a moving target as packages get added or updated.

> > particularly because changing #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash is not that 
> > difficult. I mean you also don't specify K&R mode if you want to compile 
> > C99?
>
> People don't think.  If they write "#!/bin/sh" they don't mean 'give me a 
> SUSv3 shell', they mean 'gimme some shell-thingy-stuff'.  Most people 
> writing shell scripts didn't ever hear about SUSv3.  So it's a bit 
> unforgiving to yell back at them saying 'Hah!  Didn't you know what you 
> were requesting?', true as it might be.

That's a sad fact but no reason not to do somthing about it :)
BTW, it's also nowhere mandated that /bin/sh has to be the SUSv3
shell, e.g. on Solaris 10 and the now defunct SXCE it is the
Bourne shell, however there seems to be a convergence towards
offering a shell that at least supports SUSv3 (on all Linux
distros, Opensolaris, newer OS X, and HP-UX).

> > I still think it is possible, certainly not before 11.3 but as a
> > long term goal. However, at one point in time we need to say
> > that all _newly written_ maintainer scripts must be tested with
> > dash if they specify /bin/sh and that packages are tested on a
> > system with /bin/sh pointing to dash.
>
> That's okay to _require_ after most of the work is already done.  Until 
> then it can only be a friendly request.

See above.

There is now a checkbashisms package in home:gberh, should I
submit that to devel:tools or openSUSE:Tools? I was a bit
uncomfortable with introducing a perl dependency in the dash
package. Ideally wed have a devscripts package to collect such
scripts like Fedora and Debian have.

-- 
Guido Berhoerster
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